"From the Native's Point of View":
On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding

Clifford Geertz

I

Several years ago a minor scandal erupted in
anthropology: one of its ancestral figures told the truth in a public place. As
befits an ancestor, he did it posthumously, and through his widow's decision
rather than his own, with the result that a number of the sort of right-thinking
types who are with us always immediately rose to cry that she, an in-marrier
anyway, had betrayed clan secrets, profaned an idol, and let down the side. What
will the children think, to say nothing of the layman? But the disturbance was
not much lessened by such ceremonial wringing of the hands; the damn thing was,
after all, already printed. In much the same fashion as James Watson's The
Double Helix exposed the way in which biophysics in fact gets done,
Bronislaw Malinowski A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term rendered
established accounts of how anthropologists work fairly well implausible. The
myth of the chameleon fieldworker, perfectly self-tuned to his exotic
surroundings, a walking miracle of empathy, tact, patience, and cosmopolitanism,
was demolished by the man who had perhaps done most to create it.

The squabble that arose around the publication of
the Diary concentrated, naturally, on inessentials and missed, as was
only to be expected, the point. Most of the shock seems to have arisen from the
mere discovery that Malinowski was not, to put it delicately, an unmitigated
nice guy. He had rude things to say about the natives he was living with, and
rude words to say it in. He spent a great deal of his time wishing he were
elsewhere. And he projected an image of a man about as little complaisant as the
world has seen. (He also projected an image of a man consecrated to a strange
vocation to the point of self-immolation, but that was less noted.) The
discussion was made to come down to Malinowski's moral character or lack of it,
and the genuinely profound question his book raised was ignored; namely, if it
is not, as we had been taught to believe, through some sort of extraordinary
sensibility, an almost preternatural capacity to think, feel, and perceive like
a native (a word, I should hurry to say, I use here "in the strict sense of
the term"), how is anthropological knowledge of the way natives think,
feel, and perceive possible? The issue the Diary presents, with a force
perhaps only a working ethnographer can fully appreciate, is not moral. (The
moral idealization of fieldworkers is a mere sentimentality in the first place,
when it is not self-congratulation or a guild pretense.) The issue is
epistemological. If we are going to cling--as, in my opinion, we must--to the
injunction to see things from the native's point of view, where are we when we
can no longer claim some unique form of psychological closeness, a sort of
transcultural identification, with our subjects? What happens to verstehen when einf¸hlen
disappears?

As a matter of fact, this general problem has been
exercising methodological discussion in anthropology for the last ten or fifteen
years; Malinowski's voice from the grave merely dramatizes it as a human dilemma
over and above a professional one. The formulations have been various:
"inside" versus "outside," or "first person"
versus "third person" descriptions; "phenomenological"
versus "objectivist," or "cognitive" versus
"behavioral" theories; or, perhaps most commonly "emic"
versus "etic" analyses, this last deriving from the distinction in
linguistics between phonemics and phonetics, phonemics classifying sounds
according to their internal function in language, phonetics classifying them
according to their acoustic properties as such. But perhaps the simplest and
most directly appreciable way to put the matter is in terms of a distinction
formulated, for his own purposes, by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, between what
he calls "experience-near" and "experience-distant"
concepts.

An experience-near concept is, roughly, one that
someone--a patient, a subject, in our case an informant--might himself naturally
and effortlessly use to define what he or his fellows see, feel, think, imagine,
and so on, and which he would readily understand when similarly applied by
others. An experience-distant concept is one that specialists of one sort or
another--an analyst, an experimenter, an ethnographer, even a priest or an
ideologist--employ to forward their scientific, philosophical, or practical
aims. "Love" is an experience-near concept, "object
cathexis" is an experience-distant one. "Social stratification"
and perhaps for most peoples in the world even "religion" (and
certainly "religious system") are experience-distant;
"caste" and "nirvana" are experience-near, at least for
Hindus and Buddhists.

Clearly, the matter is one of degree, not polar
opposition--"fear" is experience-nearer than "phobia," and
"phobia" experience-nearer than "ego dyssyntonic." And the
difference is not, at least so far as anthropology is concerned (the matter is
otherwise in poetry and physics), a normative one, in the sense that one sort of
concept is to be preferred as such over the other. Confinement to
experience-near concepts leaves an ethnographer awash in immediacies, as well as
entangled in vernacular. Confinement to experience-distant ones leaves him
stranded in abstractions and smothered in jargon. The real question, and the one
Malinowski raised by demonstrating that, in the case of "natives," you
don't have to be one to know one, is what roles the two sorts of concepts play
in anthropological analysis. Or, more exactly, how, in each case, ought one to
deploy them so as to produce an interpretation of the way a people lives which
is neither imprisoned within their mental horizons, an ethnography of witchcraft
as written by a witch, nor systematically deaf to the distinctive tonalities of
their existence, an ethnography of witchcraft as written by a geometer.

Putting the matter this way--in terms of how
anthropological analysis is to be conducted and its results framed, rather than
what psychic constitution anthropologists need to have--reduces the mystery of
what "seeing things from the native's point of view" means. But it
does not make it any easier, nor does it lessen the demand for perceptiveness on
the part of the fieldworker. To grasp concepts that, for another people, are
experience-near, and to do so well enough to place them in illuminating
connection with experience-distant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture
the general features of social life, is clearly a task at least as delicate, if
a bit less magical, as putting oneself into someone else's skin. The trick is
not to get yourself into some inner correspondence of spirit with your
informants. Preferring, like the rest of us, to call their souls their own, they
are not going to be altogether keen about such an effort anyhow. The trick is to
figure out what the devil they think they are up to.

In one sense, of course, no one knows this better
than they do themselves; hence the passion to swim in the stream of their
experience, and the illusion afterward that one somehow has. But in another
sense, that simple truism is simply not true. People use experience-near
concepts spontaneously, unself-consciously, as it were colloquially; they do
not, except fleetingly and on occasion, recognize that there are any
"concepts" involved at all. That is what experience-near means--that
ideas and the realities they inform are naturally and indissolubly bound up
together. What else could you call a hippopotamus? Of course the gods are
powerful, why else would we fear them? The ethnographer does not, and, in my
opinion, largely cannot, perceive what his informants perceive. What he
perceives, and that uncertainly enough, is what they perceive
"with"--or "by means of," or "through" . . . or
whatever the word should be. In the country of the blind, who are not as
unobservant as they look, the one-eyed is not king, he is spectator.

Now, to make all this a bit more concrete, I want
to turn for a moment to my own work, which, whatever its other faults, has at
least the virtue of being mine--in discussions of this sort a distinct
advantage. In all three of the societies I have studied intensively, Javanese,
Balinese, and Moroccan, I have been concerned, among other things, with
attempting to determine how the people who live there define themselves as
persons, what goes into the idea they have (but, as I say, only half-realize
they have) of what a self, Javanese, Balinese, or Moroccan style, is. And in
each case, I have tried to get at this most intimate of notions not by imagining
myself someone else, a rice peasant or a tribal sheikh, and then seeing what I
thought, but by searching out and analyzing the symbolic forms--words, images,
institutions, behaviors--in terms of which, in each place, people actually
represented themselves to themselves and to one another.

The concept of person is, in fact, an excellent
vehicle by means of which to examine this whole question of how to go about
poking into another people's turn of mind. In the first place, some sort of
concept of this kind, one feels reasonably safe in saying, exists in
recognizable form among all social groups. The notions of what persons are may
be, from our point of view, sometimes more than a little odd. They may be
conceived to dart about nervously at night shaped like fireflies. Essential
elements of their psyches, like hatred, may be thought to be lodged in granular
black bodies within their livers, discoverable upon autopsy. They may share
their fates with doppelg”nger beasts, so that when the beast sickens or
dies they sicken or die too. But at least some conception of what a human
individual is, as opposed to a rock, an animal, a rainstorm, or a god, is, so
far as I can see, universal. Yet, at the same time, as these offhand examples
suggest, the actual conceptions involved vary from one group to the next, and
often quite sharply. The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique,
more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of
awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and
set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and
natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather
peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures. Rather than attempting
to place the experience of others within the framework of such a conception,
which is what the extolled "empathy" in fact usually comes down to,
understanding them demands setting that conception aside and seeing their
experiences within the framework of their own idea of what selfbood is. And for
Java, Bali, and Morocco, at least, that idea differs markedly not only from our
own but, no less dramatically and no less instructively, from one to the other.

II

In Java, where I worked in the fifties, I studied
a small, shabby inland county-seat sort of place; two shadeless streets of
whitewashed wooden shops and offices, and even less substantial bamboo shacks
crammed in helter-skelter behind them, the whole surrounded by a great
half-circle of densely packed rice-bowl villages. Land was short, jobs were
scarce, politics was unstable, health was poor, prices were rising, and life was
altogether far from promising, a kind of agitated stagnancy in which, as I once
put it, thinking of the curious mixture of borrowed fragments of modernity and
exhausted relics of tradition that characterized the place, the future seemed
about as remote as the past. Yet in the midst of this depressing scene there was
an absolutely astonishing intellectual vitality, a philosophical passion really,
and a popular one besides, to track the riddles of existence right down to the
ground. Destitute peasants would discuss questions of freedom of the will,
illiterate tradesmen discoursed on the properties of God, common laborers had
theories about the relations between reason and passion, the nature of time, or
the reliability of the senses. And, perhaps most importantly, the problem of the
self--its nature, function, and mode of operation--was pursued with the sort of
reflective intensity one could find among ourselves in only the most recherchÈ
settings indeed.

The central ideas in terms of which this
reflection proceeded, and which thus defined its boundaries and the Javanese
sense of what a person is, were arranged into two sets of contrasts, at base
religious, one between "inside" and "outside," and one
between "refined" and "vulgar." These glosses are, of
course, crude and imprecise; determining exactly what the terms involved
signified, sorting out their shades of meaning, was what all the discussion was
about. But together they formed a distinctive conception of the self which, far
from being merely theoretical, was the one in terms of which Javanese in fact
perceived one another and, of course, themselves.

The "inside"/"outside" words, batin
and lair (terms borrowed, as a matter of fact, from the Sufi tradition of
Muslim mysticism, but locally reworked) refer on the one hand to the felt realm
of human experience and on the other to the observed realm of human behavior.
These have, one hastens to say, nothing to do with "soul" and
"body" in our sense, for which there are in fact quite other words
with quite other implications. Batin, the "inside" word, does
not refer to a separate seat of encapsulated spirituality detached or detachable
from the body, or indeed to a bounded unit at all, but to the emotional life of
human beings taken generally. It consists of the fuzzy, shifting flow of
subjective feeling perceived directly in all its phenomenological immediacy but
considered to be, at its roots at least, identical across all individuals, whose
individuality it thus effaces. And similarly, lair, the
"outside" word, has nothing to do with the body as an object, even an
experienced object. Rather, it refers to that part of human life which, in our
culture, strict behaviorists limit themselves to studying--external actions,
movements, postures, speech--again conceived as in its essence invariant from
one individual to the next. These two sets of phenomena--inward feelings and
outward actions--are then regarded not as functions of one another but as
independent realms of being to be put in proper order independently.

It is in connection with this "proper
ordering" that the contrast between alus, the word meaning
"pure," "refined," "polished,"
"exquisite," "ethereal," "subtle,"
"civilized," "smooth," and kasar, the word meaning
"impolite," "rough," "uncivilized,"
"coarse," "insensitive," "vulgar," comes into
play. The goal is to be alus in both the separated realms of the self. In
the inner realm this is to be achieved through religious discipline, much but
not all of it mystical. In the outer realm, it is to be achieved through
etiquette, the rules of which here are not only extraordinarily elaborate but
have something of the force of law. Through meditation the civilized man thins
out his emotional life to a kind of constant hum; through etiquette, he both
shields that life from external disruptions and regularizes his outer behavior
in such a way that it appears to others as a predictable, undisturbing, elegant,
and rather vacant set of choreographed motions and settled forms of speech.

There is much more to all this, because it
connects up to both an ontology and an aesthetic. But so far as our problem is
concerned, the result is a bifurcate conception of the self, half ungestured
feeling and half unfelt gesture. An inner world of stilled emotion and an outer
world of shaped behavior confront one another as sharply distinguished realms
unto themselves, any particular person being but the momentary locus, so to
speak, of that confrontation, a passing expression of their permanent existence,
their permanent separation, and their permanent need to be kept in their own
order. Only when you have seen, as I have, a young man whose wife--a woman he
had in fact raised from childhood and who had been the center of his life--has
suddenly and inexplicably died, greeting everyone with a set smile and formal
apologies for his wife's absence and trying, by mystical techniques, to flatten
out, as he himself put it, the hills and valleys of his emotion into an even,
level plain ("That is what you have to do," he said to me, "be
smooth inside and out") can you come, in the face of our own notions of the
intrinsic honesty of deep feeling and the moral importance of personal
sincerity, to take the possibility of such a conception of selfhood seriously
and appreciate, however inaccessible it is to you, its own sort of force.

III

Bali, where I worked both in another small
provincial town, though one rather less drifting and dispirited, and, later, in
an upland village of highly skilled musical instruments makers, is of course in
many ways similar to Java, with which it shared a common culture to the
fifteenth century. But at a deeper level, having continued Hindu while Java was,
nominally at least, Islamized, it is quite different. The intricate, obsessive
ritual life--Hindu, Buddhist, and Polynesian in about equal proportions--whose
development was more or less cut off in Java, leaving its Indic spirit to turn
reflective and phenomenological, even quietistic, in the way I have just
described, flourished in Bali to reach levels of scale and flamboyance that have
startled the world and made the Balinese a much more dramaturgical people with a
self to match. What is philosophy in Java is theater in Bali.

As a result, there is in Bali a persistent and
systematic attempt to stylize all aspects of personal expression to the point
where anything idiosyncratic, anything characteristic of the individual merely
because he is who he is physically, psychologically, or biographically, is muted
in favor of his assigned place in the continuing and, so it is thought,
never-changing pageant that is Balinese life. It is dramatis personae, not
actors, that endure; indeed, it is dramatis personae, not actors, that in the
proper sense really exist. Physically men come and go, mere incidents in a
happenstance history, of no genuine importance even to themselves. But the masks
they wear, the stage they occupy, the parts they play, and, most important, the
spectacle they mount remain, and comprise not the faÁade but the substance of
things, not least the self. Shakespeare's old-trouper view of the vanity of
action in the face of mortality--all the world's a stage and we but poor
players, content to strut our hour, and so on--makes no sense here. There is no
make-believe; of course players perish, but the play does not, and it is the
latter, the performed rather than the performer, that really matters.

Again, all this is realized not in terms of some
general mood the anthropologist in his spiritual versatility somehow captures,
but through a set of readily observable symbolic forms: an elaborate repertoire
of designations and titles. The Balinese have at least a half-dozen major sorts
of labels, ascriptive, fixed, and absolute, which one person can apply to
another (or, of course, to himself) to place him among his fellows. There are
birth-order markers, kinship terms, caste titles, sex indicators, teknonyms, and
so on and so forth, each of which consists not of a mere collection of useful
tags but a distinct and bounded, internally very complex, terminological system.
When one applies one of these designations or titles (or, as is more common,
several at once) to someone, one therefore defines him as a determinate point in
a fixed pattern, as the temporary occupant of a particular, quite untemporary,
cultural locus. To identify someone, yourself or somebody else, in Bali is thus
to locate him within the familiar cast of characters--"king,"
"grandmother," "third-born," "Brahman"--of which
the social drama is, like some stock company roadshow piece-- Charley's Aunt
or Springtime for Henry --inevitably composed.

The drama is of course not farce, and especially
not transvestite farce, though there are such elements in it. It is an enactment
of hierarchy, a theater of status. But that, though critical, is unpursuable
here. The immediate point is that, in both their structure and their mode of
operation, the terminological systems conduce to a view of the human person as
an appropriate representative of a generic type, not a unique creature with a
private fate. To see how they do this, how they tend to obscure the mere
materialities--biological, psychological, historical--of individual existence in
favor of standardized status qualities would involve an extended analysis. But
perhaps a single example, the simplest further simplified, will suffice to
suggest the pattern.

All Balinese receive what might be called
birth-order names. There are four of these, "first-born,"
"second-born," "third-born," "fourth-born," after
which they recycle, so that the fifth-born child is called again
"first-born," the sixth "second-born," and so on. Further,
these names are bestowed independently of the fates of the children. Dead
children, even stillborn ones, count, so that in fact, in this still
high-birthrate, high-mortality society, the names do not really tell you
anything very reliable about the birth-order relations of concrete individuals.
Within a set of living siblings, someone called "first-born" may
actually be first, fifth, or ninth-born, or, if somebody is missing, almost
anything in between, and someone called "second-born" may in fact be
older. The birth-order naming system does not identify individuals as
individuals, nor is it intended to; what it does is to suggest that, for all
procreating couples, births form a circular succession of "firsts,"
"seconds," "thirds," and "fourths," an endless
four-stage replication of an imperishable form. Physically men appear and
disappear as the ephemerae they are, but socially the acting figures remain
eternally the same as new "firsts," "seconds," and so on
emerge from the timeless world of the gods to replace those who, dying, dissolve
once more into it. All the designation and title systems, so I would argue,
function in the same way: they represent the most time-saturated aspects of the
human condition as but ingredients in an eternal, footlight present.

Nor is this sense the Balinese have of always
being on stage a vague and ineffable one either. It is, in fact, exactly summed
up in what is surely one of their experience-nearest concepts: lek. Lek
has been variously translated or mistranslated ("shame" is the most
common attempt); but what it really means is close to what we call stage fright.
Stage fright consists, of course, in the fear that, for want of skill or
self-control, or perhaps by mere accident, an aesthetic illusion will not be
maintained, that the actor will show through his part. Aesthetic distance
collapses, the audience (and the actor) lose sight of Hamlet and gain it,
uncomfortably for all concerned, of bumbling John Smith painfully miscast as the
Prince of Denmark. In Bali, the case is the same: what is feared is that the
public performance to which one's cultural location commits one will be botched
and that the personality--as we would call it but the Balinese, of course, not
believing in such a thing, would not--of the individual will break through to
dissolve his standardized public identity. When this occurs, as it sometimes
does, the immediacy of the moment is felt with excruciating intensity and men
become suddenly and unwillingly creatural, locked in mutual embarrassment, as
though they had happened upon each other's nakedness. It is the fear of faux
pas, rendered only that much more probable by the extraordinary ritualization of
daily life, that keeps social intercourse on its deliberately narrowed rails and
protects the dramatistical sense of self against the disruptive threat implicit
in the immediacy and spontaneity even the most passionate ceremoniousness cannot
fully eradicate from face-to-face encounters.

IV

Morocco, Middle Eastern and dry rather than East
Asian and wet, extrovert, fluid, activist, masculine, informal to a fault, a
Wild West sort of place without the barrooms and the cattle drives, is another
kettle of selves altogether. My work there, which began in the mid-sixties, has
been centered around a moderately large town or small city in the foothills of
the Middle Atlas, about twenty miles south of Fez. It's an old place, probably
founded in the tenth century, conceivably even earlier. It has the walls, the
gates, the narrow minarets rising to prayer-call platforms of a classical Muslim
town, and, from a distance anyway, it is a rather pretty place, an irregular
oval of blinding white set in the deep-sea-green of an olive grove oasis, the
mountains, bronze and stony here, slanting up immediately behind it. Close up,
it is less prepossessing, though more exciting: a labyrinth of passages and
alleyways, three quarters of them blind, pressed in by wall-like buildings and
curbside shops and filled with a simply astounding variety of very emphatic
human beings. Arabs, Berbers, and Jews; tailors, herdsmen, and soldiers; people
out of offices, people out of markets, people out of tribes; rich, superrich,
poor, superpoor; locals, immigrants, mimic Frenchmen, unbending medievalists,
and somewhere, according to the official government census for 1960, an
unemployed Jewish airplane pilot--the town houses one of the finest collections
of rugged individuals I, at least, have ever come up against. Next to Sefrou
(the name of the place), Manhattan seems almost monotonous.

Yet no society consists of anonymous eccentrics
bouncing off one another like billiard balls, and Moroccans, too, have symbolic
means by which to sort people out from one another and form an idea of what it
is to be a person. The main such means--not the only one, but I think the most
important and the one I want to talk about particularly here--is a peculiar
linguistic form called in Arabic the nisba. The word derives from the
triliteral root, n-s-b, for "ascription,"
"attribution," "imputation," "relationship,"
"affinity," "correlation," "connection,"
"kinship." Nsīb means "in-law"; nsab
means "to attribute or impute to"; munāsaba means "a
relation," "an analogy," "a correspondence"; mansṫb
means "belonging to," "pertaining to"; and so on to at least
a dozen derivatives, from nassāb ("genealogist") to nīsbīya
("[physical] relativity").

Nisba itself, then, refers to a combination
morphological, grammatical, and semantic process that consists in transforming a
noun into what we would call a relative adjective but what for Arabs is just
another sort of noun by adding ī (f., īya): Ṣefrṫ/Sefrou--Ṣefrṫwī/native
son of Sefrou; Sṫs/region of southwestern Morocco--Sṫsī/man
coming from that region; Beni Yazḡa/a tribe near Sefrou--Yazḡī/a
member of that tribe; Yahṫd/the Jews as a people, Jewry--Yahṫdī/a
Jew; 'Adlun/surname of a prominent Sefrou family--'Adlṫnī/a
member of that family. Nor is the procedure confined to this more or less
straightforward "ethnicizing" use, but is employed in a wide range of
domains to attribute relational properties to persons. For example, occupation (hrār/silk--hrārī/silk
merchant); religious sect (Darqāwā/a mystical brotherhood--DarqāwU+012B/an
adept of that brotherhood or spiritual status), ('Ali /The Prophet's
son-in-law-- 'Alawī/descendant of the Prophet's son-in-law, and thus
of the Prophet).

Now, as once formed, nisbas tend to be
incorporated into personal names--Umar Al-Buhadiwi/Umar of the Buhadu Tribe;
Muhammed Al-Sussi/Muhammed from the Sus Region--this sort of adjectival
attributive classification is quite publicly stamped onto an individual's
identity. I was unable to find a single case where an individual was generally
known, or known about, but his or her nisba was not. Indeed, Sefrouis are far
more likely to be ignorant of how well-off a man is, how long he has been
around, what his personal character is, or where exactly he lives, than they are
of what his nisba is--Sussi or Sefroui, Buhadiwi or Adluni, Harari or Darqawi.
(Of women to whom he is not related that is very likely to be all that he
knows--or, more exactly, is permitted to know.) The selves that bump and jostle
each other in the alleys of Sefrou gain their definition from associative
relations they are imputed to have with the society that surrounds them. They
are contextualized persons.

But the situation is even more radical than this;
nisbas render men relative to their contexts, but as contexts themselves are
relative, so too are nisbas, and the whole thing rises, so to speak, to the
second power: relativism squared. Thus, at one level, everyone in Sefrou has the
same nisba, or at least the potential of it--namely, Sefroui. However, within
Sefrou such a nisba, precisely because it does not discriminate, will never be
heard as part of an individual designation. It is only outside of Sefrou that
the relationship to that particular context becomes identifying. Inside it, he
is an Adluni, Alawi, Meghrawi, Ngadi, or whatever. And similarly within these
categories: there are, for example, twelve different nisbas (Shakibis, Zuinis,
and so forth) by means of which, among themselves, Sefrou Alawis distinguish one
another.

The whole matter is far from regular: what level
or sort of nisba is used and seems relevant and appropriate (to the users, that
is) depends heavily on the situation. A man I knew who lived in Sefrou and
worked in Fez but came from the Beni Yazgha tribe settled nearby--and from the
Hima lineage of the Taghut subfraction of the Wulad Ben Ydir fraction within
it--was known as a Sefroui to his work fellows in Fez, a Yazghi to all of us
non-Yazghis in Sefrou, an Ydiri to other Beni Yazghas around, except for those
who were themselves of the Wulad Ben Ydir fraction, who called him a Taghuti. As
for the few other Taghutis, they called him a Himiwi. That is as far as things
went here, but not as far as they can go, in either direction. Should, by
chance, our friend journey to Egypt, he would become a Maghrebi, the nisba
formed from the Arabic word for North Africa. The social contextualization of
persons is pervasive and, in its curiously unmethodical way, systematic. Men do
not float as bounded psychic entities, detached from their backgrounds and
singularly named. As individualistic, even willful, as the Moroccans in fact
are, their identity is an attribute they borrow from their setting.

Now as with the Javanese inside/outside,
smooth/rough phenomenological sort of reality dividing, and the absolutizing
Balinese title systems, the nisba way of looking at persons--as though they were
outlines waiting to be filled in--is not an isolated custom, but part of a total
pattern of social life. This pattern is, like the others, difficult to
characterize succinctly, but surely one of its outstanding features is a
promiscuous tumbling in public settings of varieties of men kept carefully
segregated in private ones--all-out cosmopolitanism in the streets, strict
communalism (of which the famous secluded woman is only the most striking index)
in the home. This is, indeed, the so-called mosaic system of social organization
so often held to be characteristic of the Middle East generally: differently
shaped and colored chips jammed in irregularly together to generate an intricate
overall design within which their individual distinctiveness remains nonetheless
intact. Nothing if not diverse, Moroccan society does not cope with its
diversity by sealing it into castes, isolating it into tribes, dividing it into
ethnic groups, or covering it over with some common-denominator concept of
nationality, though, fitfully, all have now and then been tried. It copes with
it by distinguishing, with elaborate precision, the contexts--marriage, worship,
and to an extent diet, law, and education--within which men are separated by
their dissimilitudes, and those--work, friendship, politics, trade--where,
however warily and however conditionally, they are connected by them.

To such a social pattern, a concept of selfhood
which marks public identity contextually and relativistically, but yet does so
in terms--tribal, territorial, linguistic, religious, familial--that grow out of
the more private and settled arenas of life and have a deep and permanent
resonance there, would seem particularly appropriate. Indeed, the social pattern
would seem virtually to create this concept of selfhood, for it produces a
situation where people interact with one another in terms of categories whose
meaning is almost purely positional, location in the general mosaic, leaving the
substantive content of the categories, what they mean subjectively as
experienced forms of life, aside as something properly concealed in apartments,
temples, and tents. Nisba discriminations can be more specific or less, indicate
location within the mosaic roughly or finely, and they can be adapted to almost
any changes in circumstance. But they cannot carry with them more than the most
sketchy, outline implications concerning what men so named as a rule are like.
Calling a man a Sefroui is like calling him a San Franciscan: it classifies him,
but it does not type him; it places him without portraying him.

It is the nisba system's capacity to do this--to
create a framework within which persons can be identified in terms of supposedly
immanent characteristics (speech, blood, faith, provenance, and the rest)--and
yet to minimize the impact of those characteristics in determining the practical
relations among such persons in markets, shops, bureaus, fields, cafÈs, baths,
and roadways that makes it so central to the Moroccan idea of the self.
Nisba-type categorization leads, paradoxically, to a hyperindividualism in
public relationships, because by providing only a vacant sketch, and that
shifting, of who the actors are-Yazghis, Adlunis, Buhadiwis, or whatever--it
leaves the rest, that is, almost everything, to be filled in by the process of
interaction itself. What makes the mosaic work is the confidence that one can be
as totally pragmatic, adaptive, opportunistic, and generally ad hoc in one's
relations with others--a fox among foxes, a crocodile among crocodiles--as one
wants without any risk of losing one's sense of who one is. Selfhood is never in
danger because, outside the immediacies of procreation and prayer, only its
coordinates are asserted.

V

Now, without trying to tie up the dozens of loose
ends I have not only left dangling in these rather breathless accounts of the
senses of selfhood of nearly ninety million people but have doubtless frazzled
even more, let us return to the question of what all this can tell us, or could
if it were done adequately, about "the native's point of view" in
Java, Bali, and Morocco. Are we, in describing symbol uses, describing
perceptions, sentiments, outlooks, experiences? And in what sense? What do we
claim when we claim that we understand the semiotic means by which, in this
case, persons are defined to one another? That we know words or that we know
minds?

In answering this question, it is necessary, I
think, first to notice the characteristic intellectual movement, the inward
conceptual rhythm, in each of these analyses, and indeed in all similar
analyses, including those of Malinowski--namely, a continuous dialectical
tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global
structure in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view. In seeking to
uncover the Javanese, Balinese, or Moroccan sense of self, one oscillates
restlessly between the sort of exotic minutiae (lexical antitheses, categorical
schemes, morphophonemic transformations) that make even the best ethnographies a
trial to read and the sort of sweeping characterizations ("quietism,"
"dramatism," "contextualism") that make all but the most
pedestrian of them somewhat implausible. Hopping back and forth between the
whole conceived through the parts that actualize it and the parts conceived
through the whole that motivates them, we seek to turn them, by a sort of
intellectual perpetual motion, into explications of one another.

All this is, of course, but the now familiar
trajectory of what Dilthey called the hermeneutic circle, and my argument here
is merely that it is as central to ethnographic interpretation, and thus to the
penetration of other people's modes of thought, as it is to literary,
historical, philological, psychoanalytic, or biblical interpretation, or for
that matter to the informal annotation of everyday experience we call common
sense. In order to follow a baseball game one must understand what a bat, a hit,
an inning, a left fielder, a squeeze play, a hanging curve, and a tightened
infield are, and what the game in which these "things" are elements is
all about. When an explication de texte critic like Leo Spitzer attempts
to interpret Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," he does so by
repetitively asking himself the alternating question "What is the whole
poem about?" and "What exactly has Keats seen (or chosen to show us)
depicted on the urn he is describing?," emerging at the end of an advancing
spiral of general observations and specific remarks with a reading of the poem
as an assertion of the triumph of the aesthetic mode of perception over the
historical. In the same way, when a meanings-and-symbols ethnographer like
myself attempts to find out what some pack of natives conceive a person to be,
he moves back and forth between asking himself, "What is the general form
of their life?" and "What exactly are the vehicles in which that form
is embodied?," emerging in the end of a similar sort of spiral with the
notion that they see the self as a composite, a persona, or a point in a
pattern. You can no more know what lek is if you do not know what Balinese
dramatism is than you can know what a catcher's mitt is if you do not know what
baseball is. And you can no more know what mosaic social organization is if you
do not know what a nisba is than you can know what Keats's Platonism is if you
are unable to grasp, to use Spitzer's own formulation, the "intellectual
thread of thought" captured in such fragment phrases as "Attic
shape," "silent form," "bride of quietness," "cold
pastoral," "silence and slow time," "peaceful citadel,"
or "ditties of no tone."

In short, accounts of other peoples'
subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to
more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal
capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation,
if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and
accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for
insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate
or half-accurate sense one gets of what one's informants are, as the phrase
goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such,
which is part of one's own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability
to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems,
which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the
form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives' inner
lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke--or,
as I have suggested, reading a poem--than it is like achieving communion.

tween asking himself, "What is the general
form of their life?" and "What exactly are the vehicles in which that
form is embodied?," emerging in the end of a similar sort of spiral with
the notion that they see the self as a composite, a persona, or a point in a
pattern. You can no more know what lek is if you do not know what Balinese
dramatism is than you can know what a catcher's mitt is if you do not know what
baseball is. And you can no more know what mosaic social organization is if you
do not know what a nisba is than you can know what Keats's Platonism is if you
are unable to grasp, to use Spitzer's own formulation, the "intellectual
thread of thought" captured in such fragment phrases as "Attic
shape," "silent form," "bride of quietness," "cold
pastoral," "silence and slow time," "peaceful citadel,"
or "ditties of no tone."

In short, accounts of other peoples'
subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to
more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal
capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation,
if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and
accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for
insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate
or half-accurate sense one gets of what one's informants are, as the phrase
goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such,
which is part of one's own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability
to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems,
which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the
form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives' inner
lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke--or,
as I have suggested, reading a poem--than it is like achieving communion.

"From the Native's Point of View":
On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding, in: Bulletin of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 28 no. 1 (1974), pp. 26-45.

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